The ‘smut peddler’ who relished free-speech fights

Larry Flynt 1942–2021

Larry Flynt took delight in demolishing the boundaries of decency. Scoffing at Playboy’s idea of pornography as art, the Hustler magazine founder built a $400 million raunch empire by printing graphic nude close-ups and depicting women in every degrading pose imaginable: on a leash, nailed to a cross, and, for a 1978 cover, halfway through a meat grinder. Hustler taunted conservative religious leaders and feminists and ran cartoons that depicted rape, botched abortions, and children in sexual poses. Flynt relished the ensuing outrage and obscenity lawsuits, once appearing in court wearing an American-flag diaper, and another time in a shirt that read “F--- this court.” His goal, he later explained, was simple: “I wanted to offend everyone on an equal-opportunity basis.” Flynt was born to an “alcoholic father and a teenage mother” in the “hardscrabble hollows of Magoffin County, Ky.,” said The Washington Post. At age 15, he quit school and—using a fake birth certificate—joined the Army and then the Navy, where he served as a radar operator for five years. After being discharged in 1964, Flynt began buying bars in Dayton, Ohio, and opened his first strip joint, naming it the Hustler Club. There were soon Hustler Clubs across Ohio, and in 1974 Flynt converted his popular four-page “Hustler” newsletter into a glossy, national magazine. Hustler “became a sensation in 1975” when it published photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude in Greece, said The Hollywood Reporter. Flynt had paid a paparazzo $18,000 for the shots; sales of the issue made him a millionaire. “Arriving for a 1978 obscenity trial in Georgia,” Flynt was shot by a white supremacist who objected to Hustler’s depictions of interracial sex, said the Los Angeles Times. Left paralyzed from the waist down, Flynt bought an $85,000 gold-plated wheelchair. He remained a regular in courtrooms. In his most notorious case—portrayed in the 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt—he was hit with a $45 million libel suit by televangelist Jerry Falwell after Hustler published a parody in which the preacher reminisced about an outhouse rendezvous with his mother. A jury awarded Falwell $200,000, but the Supreme Court threw out the damages, affirming the right to publish “outrageous opinions” about public figures. “If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me,” Flynt said, “then it will protect all of you. Because I’m the worst.”